Beverly Buchanan 2011 HONOR AWARDS Diane Burko HONOR AWARDS FOR LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT IN THE VISUAL ARTS ARTS VISUAL THE IN ACHIEVEMENT LIFETIME FOR AWARDS HONOR Ofelia Garcia Joan Marter Carolee Schneemann Sylvia Sleigh WOMEN’S CAUCUS FOR ART CAUCUS WOMEN’S 2011 Honor Awards Saturday, February th New York City Introduction Janice Nesser-Chu WCA National Board President, 2010–12 Presentation of Lifetime Achievement Awards Beverly Buchanan Essay by Lucy Lippard. Presentation by Marianetta Porter. Diane Burko Essay by Judith E. Stein. Presentation by Mary D. Garrard. Ofelia Garcia Essay and Presentation by Susan Ball. Joan Marter Essay and Presentation by Midori Yoshimoto. Carolee Schneemann Essay by Andrea Kirsh. Presentation by Jill O’Bryan. Sylvia Sleigh Essay by Andrew Hottle. Presentation by Paula Ewin. Award received by Douglas John and Edward Signorile. Presentation of President’s Art & Activism Award Maria Torres Presentation by Janice Nesser-Chu. Foreword and Acknowledgments At this year’s awards ceremony, the Women’s Caucus oeuvre in her essay. Artist and writer Jill O’Bryan will for Art recognizes several women whose contributions present her with the award. Art historian Andrew Hottle to the visual arts have changed all our lives. Though provided his observations on Sylvia Sleigh in his essay. they may have worked individually or collectively with Her assistant Paula Ewin will present a remembrance of others, each has toiled in pursuit of her vision to make Sylvia. Her manager Douglas John and her friend Edward the world a better place. Such an ambitious approach Signorile will receive the award in her memory. often is not the awardee’s stated goal; rather along the way she might have been focusing on expressing the In addition, following the Lifetime Achievement Awards, inexpressible, striving to work in a place formerly off- we recognize the President's Art & Activism Awardee limits to women, making a living, doing work of interest Maria Torres who has been instrumental in the life of to herself, or minimizing the suffering of others through many community members in the Bronx, creating a her art or efforts. We honor six individuals with the model organization for others to examine and Lifetime Achievement Award. They are Beverly Buchanan, investigate. Diane Burko, Ofelia Garcia, Joan Marter, Carolee Schneemann, and Sylvia Sleigh. We honor these six Many women have helped realize this event and women because they have asserted visions and catalogue. In particular, the efforts of certain women directions impacting the visual arts professions, must be acknowledged. They are the Honor Awards histories, and institutions. Coordination Committee: Janice Nesser-Chu, President, Co-Chair, NY Conference, Holly Dodge, VP Special Events, The presenters and essayists help us understand the Linda Gilbert-Schneider, Co-Chair, NY Con ference, scope of each awardee’s accomplishments. Author and Maureen Shanahan, Chair Fundraising; the Honors curator Lucy Lippard, a past recipient of the Lifetime Awards Selection Committee: Eleanor Dickinson, Kat Achievement Award, offered us her thoughts on Griefen, Mary Jane Jacob, Leslie King-Hammond, Beverly Buchanan’s achievements in her essay. Amalia Mesa-Bains, Dena Muller, Howardena Pindell, Professor and designer Marianetta Porter will present Melissa Potter, Lowery Stokes Sims, June Wayne, Ruth Beverly with the award. Art historian Judith Stein Weisberg, and Midori Yoshimoto; as well as Karin Luner, provided the essay on Diane Burko. Mary Garrard, Director of Operations and Publisher. also a past recipients of the Lifetime Achievement Award and art historian, will present Diane with the In addition, the Women’s Caucus for Art is grateful to award. Arts administrator Susan Ball wrote the essay this year’s numerous supporters of the 2011 awards. on and will present the award to Ofelia Garcia. Art historian, curator, and gallery director Midori Yoshimoto Anne Swartz has given us the essay on Joan Marter and will present Honor Awards Chair the award. Gallery director and conser vator Andrea Kirsh gave us insights into Carolee Schneeman’s varied I would like to take the opportunity to welcome you to the 32nd Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Awards. First awarded in 1979, the Honor Awards were one of the first awards recognizing the contribution of Women’s women to the arts and their profound effect on society. The Awards continue to honor women's work, their visions, their commitments, and their sheer determination. They bring to light not only their voices, but the voices Caucus of thousands of women who came before them who for remained anonymous, hidden in the shadows of their male counterparts. Art Today, we continue that tradition, not because of sentiment but because of the need: the need for women in the arts to be recognized, to be validated, Statement of Purpose and to be acknowledged. We want future generations to pick up a text book and understand the depth and breadth of women's contributions to the arts and We are committed to: society, which these awards recognize. Many years ago, Joan Braderman wrote in “Juggling recognizing the contributions of women in the arts the Contradictions” which appeared in Heresies, 'If we women don't begin to write ourselves into history, who will?” These words are as true in 2011 as they were in providing women with leadership opportunities 1976. We must honor the women in our lives, our culture, our mothers, and our sisters. and professional development I invite you to laud the women we celebrate this year: expanding networking and exhibition Beverly Buchanan, Diane Burko, Ofelia Garcia, Joan Marter, Carolee Schneemann, Sylvia Sleigh, and opportunities for women President’s Art & Activism Awardee Maria Torres. Say their names out loud. Talk about them to your supporting local, national, and global art activism friends and colleagues. Teach about them in your classrooms. Write about them in your papers and books. advocating for equity in the arts for all I challenge you to create your history. Janice Nesser-Chu WCA National Board President 2010–12 iii Beverly Buchanan We honor you, Beverly Buchanan, for your visionary commitment to your art and your images of African-American life. Photo by Jane Bridges Memory Made Modern by Lucy Lippard Beverly Buchanan’s art appears to deal with the past, with history, but it is far from nostalgic. With scavenged scraps of tin, stone, cardboard, and old wood that might have come from the very bodies of the collapsing buildings themselves, she revitalizes the lives of those who lived in her “shacks.” Sometimes the dwellings too come to life, tottering on stone “feet.” Like the concrete of her public sculptures, they are a testament to survival, her own and that of all the unknown Americans who have been shunted off to the margins of hardship and isolation. Though they often made up for it with the flowers in their yards, the people who lived in these dwellings could not usually afford to paint their homes. So sometimes Buchanan does it for them. Her drawings and sculptures are animated with brilliant, frenetically energized scribbles of color that have been compared to Joan Mitchell and other expressionists. Yet these painterly marks are dedicated to their content rather than to abstraction. Curator Trinkett Clark has called them “joyful elegies.” Buchanan uses domestic architecture as a cultural and economic metaphor, documenting and transforming these modest places and their invisible, often tragic histories. “I expected blacks not to like them,” she has said. “But they weep.” A friend of the artist’s is fond of quoting Gandhi: “Poverty is the worst form of violence.” But poverty has generated some of society’s most admirably determined figures. And poverty can also be a positive tool for preservation, since the homes of the poor are less in danger of being altered. In 2001 Buchanan made a little booklet “Historical Preservation Through Art,” the handwritten diary of a road trip out of Macon, Georgia in which she photographed former slave cabins—dilapidated “dog trots,” “shot guns,” “palmetto barns,” and “saddlebags,” some of them still in use, some boasting beautiful deep porches and ingenious construction. At one point she made expressionist paintings on tin cans, demonstrating her affinity for southern outsider art (Nellie Mae Rowe, for instance) as she struggled to achieve “a simple uncomplicated look in my work.” In 1977 Buchanan gave up her parallel career in public health and Beverly Buchanan, Old Colored School, 2009 Cedar and acrylic paint and apple crate, 20.25 x 18.75 x 14.5" returned as an artist to the south, Photo by Jane Bridges. 5 where she was born, raised, and educated before going to New York to attend Columbia (and to study with Norman Lewis). In Georgia, she discovered a passion for vernacular architecture, which she had inherited from her father, Walter May Buchanan, an educator who also photographed and studied the lives of black farmers. Her shacks are tributes to her ancestors as well as contemporary comments on social resilience and unique artworks occupying a zone between memory and modernism. The local is all about specificity. Buchanan collects stories about the owners and their pasts. Her titles include the owner’s name when she knows it; others are fictional. The early shacks were somber, made of clay, painted black, as if in mourning for their vanished residents. She described one as “all hushed up.” There is a hermetic and even melancholic side to Buchanan’s art that is evident in her public art. Marsh Ruins was conceived simply as “a sculpture in tall grass.” It simultaneously blends with and enhances its coastal environment. Ruins and Rituals, in Macon, evokes ancient ruins as well as the “city ruins” Buchanan had made in the 1960s. She says that it looked so much like a graveyard she thought of calling it “Southern Comfort.” A three-part piece, its other components were virtually invisible— one “abandoned” in a wooded area, another sunk in the Ocmulgee River.